Considerations when choosing a wedding venue in Spain

Finding the right wedding venue can be a daunting task, especially when you are trying to get as much information as possible whilst organising a destination wedding in a different country.

Here is a bit of professional advice before you commit to booking a venue here in Spain.

1. Plan B Weather

In the event of high winds or rain does your venue have a back up space?  

If your venue does not have enough space to move an entire wedding inside, i,e, ceremony, dinner and dancing then you must factor in the cost of installing a marquee, perhaps with heating, lighting, etc and do check out the available spaces in your venue to make a wedding work if you cannot host it outside.

You must also factor inside spaces into your arrangements if the venue does not allow music outside after midnight, see no 2.

Do bear in mind this will apply even if your wedding is organised in the summer months, i,e June, July and August as often here we suffer from high winds, particularly if you are planning a beach wedding.  I can recall two weddings we had last year, one in June and one in August where it was blowing a gale.

2. Can you play music outside?

Here I find this is one of the most crucial factors for our couples wishing to host their wedding here in Spain.

Often it is assumed that as we lead a very outdoor Mediterranean lifestyle we can party outside until all hours, but sadly no.  There are very strict noise regulations in place in venues and private villas which are located in built up areas.

Noise has to be kept to a minimum during the evening and after midnight it is forbidden, hence you are going to have to move your party inside.  There are a few venue exceptions but over this past year I have met with many couples who have booked a private villa only to subsequently find out about the music curfews and are faced with having to work around these restrictions for their celebration, which of course they had not anticipated.

Do be careful, many private villas want bookings and are not going to enlighten you with this information until they have received your deposit and you are locked into a rental agreement with them.  Ask them before you book if there are any music restrictions.

3. Decoration of your Spaces

Many of our venues here in Spain are already stunningly beautiful which is a bonus and only require a few elements of decoration to add some style and personalise your wedding.   

However do consider if you are hosting a wedding which has a plan b room that you may need to spend extra on providing some more decor to liven the space up.

4. Catering and a Kitchen at your Venue.

If you have chosen a stunningly remote venue for your wedding do check that there are facilities installed, i,e kitchens and toilets.  It sounds quite a basic thing but if there is not a lot at your venue you are going to have to pay to bring them in, for example mobile kitchens and mobile toilets.  This is quite a cost as off premises caterers will have to build adequate kitchens to cater for your wedding on site.  So do get quotes and check with suppliers how much it is going to cost to bring everyone to your wedding before you commit to your beautiful but secluded venue.

5. Access to the Venue.

You have fallen in love with a venue, it ticks all the boxes and it is set in the stunning hills of Andalucia. You can play music outside all night and it is perfect, it has adequate kitchens and toilets, but it is accessible for all the suppliers who will be arriving to create your event?  
Calculate the amount of suppliers who are going to come to your venue to create your wedding, they arrive in cars!   

You will have catering trucks, coaches or mini buses bringing guests to your venue and all the other suppliers, hair and make up, photographer, videographer, entertainment, wedding planner, etc so do check the access roads are suitable and there is adequate parking available for all the trucks and cars who will be there attending to your event and make sure they can park out of sight.

I hope this helps you with a little bit of advice and of course you can always enlist our pre-wedding consultation service with our expert knowledge before you confirm your perfect venue.

Help Us to Help You, Getting Married in Spain

Here in Spain there are a wealth of fabulously talented wedding suppliers, from planners, stylists, photographers, caterers, entertainers, you name it we are brilliant at it!

We live, eat, sleep weddings and love our jobs, nurture our businesses and all work extremely hard throughout the year, often in very high temperatures, to produce fabulous events for couples travelling into Spain from all over the world. 

Clients come from the UK, US, Ireland, Dubai, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong to name but a few, in fact Spain is now so popular and such a central location with almost year round wonderful weather that the wedding industry has rocketed here in the past 3 years.

The average wedding planner will work on about 30 weddings each year, catering companies maybe double or more. Entertainers, florists, musicians, cake designers and packaged venue weddings can do up to 100 weddings each year.  We are all busy and love it!

Now some advice for couples wishing to get married in Spain :)

Firstly we want to help you, we want to create your dream wedding in Spain, find you the perfect venue and advise and assist as much as we can before you take the plunge.

Planning a wedding abroad can be a daunting prospect but we are all good at it, all of our clients come from abroad, it is our business, destination weddings, and here is how you can make your initial enquiry easier for us to respond to.

Email us with plenty of time before you decide to visit us.

Tell us what your ideal wedding is, location, number of expected guests and ideal budget you have to spend.  None of our weddings are factory led and we create dream days according to what our clients want.  

This cannot be factored and shoe horned into a package.  

If you want a 3 day wedding in the fabulous city of Seville or a relaxed stylish beach wedding we need to send you relevant up to date information including the following:

What venues are available on your dates.
The most up to date and latest prices for each service you require.
A true budget outline as to what to expect your ideal day to cost.
The pros and cons of each venue, we offer transparent advice to our clients.

We offer a pre-wedding consultancy service to do just this for you.

Yes we can send you generic and general information but if you wish us to work for you and provide all the information I have listed above this takes time.  

Time is something I have to pay my team for but it is worth it as you will receive personalised up to date information designed for you with your ideal day set out and if you are planning a visit, a personalised itinerary.

So here is my list of what not to do if you are planning a wedding in Spain :)!

1. Don't rock up here in Spain, trawl through the internet for wedding planners in Spain, find us, email us and expect us to be available at the drop of a hat, we are busy.  

I have had two emails this week from potential clients who have arrived in Spain and have decided only now to contact planners asking to see venues this weekend?!

We have a wedding this weekend and pre-booked clients visiting us so this is a complete impossibility to even begin to prepare anything in that time frame, let alone organise a venue viewing trip for you which let's face it is not going to be any good if we managed anything.  

We need time and a lot of effort on our part to make sure your trip here is worthwhile.  

You have paid for your flights over here and no doubt accommodation so why leave such an important thing as a last minute fly by night decision?   

It is always heart breaking for us not to be able to jump into action and answer every query we have because the couple have left it to the last minute to get organised.

2. Don't approach wedding suppliers and expect them to be available to meet with you if you have not booked them.  

Every supplier again gets about 8 to 10 enquiries a day, many of the enquiries they will never hear from again so don't ask them to pop by and meet you on a Sunday afternoon an hour away from where they are based.  If they did this for every email they receive you can only begin to imagine how chaotic their lives would be!!

Having had an ever so slightly tiny deep sigh moan on my personal page about this, this week I got many messages from wedding suppliers sending me impossible requests from potential clients.

One that stood out was a cake maker, and a very popular one who is already practically booked out for 2016.  A potential client had just arrived in Spain, was around on Sunday and would love to meet with her......she has two weddings, a family and her husband gets one day off a week which ironically is a Sunday....I say no more!

3. Check out our busy times.

Our wedding season starts usually from April through to October, the months of May, June, July and September are bonkers, we are literally running from wedding to wedding.  
Here in Spain being a destination wedding country weddings are not nicely spaced out to one every Saturday, some suppliers are completing 7 or more a week.

Unless you have prebooked your trip and organised venue viewings here are the obstacles you may come across if you decide to visit Spain during busy wedding months.

You cannot access the venues, they are full and have weddings on.
All the event managers at the hotels are otherwise engaged and cannot attend to meetings.
You cannot see suppliers, they are booked with weddings and are too busy to attend to meetings.
If you wish to view private villas, they may having paying guests staying there so you won't be able to view the property unless the guests concede and allow access during their stay.

My summary and mantra for this blog post is be organised and be aware that you need to contact us and any wedding supplier sooner rather than later.   We are here and willing to help but we are human and running businesses that are at times so busy it does not leave us anytime to factor in last minute requests and demands made upon us.

It is not within us to want to disappoint clients as we run hospitality led businesses and our aim is to please and delight our clients but when we are given last minute demands and unrealistic timelines we just are not able to fulfill these to the best of our abilities.

Be an organised bride to be and give us lots of notice, as much information as possible and appreciate our time and efforts.

If we meet with you and follow up our meeting it would be lovely to have a response instead of nothing, we have taken time out of our busy schedules to spend time with you chatting weddings and it is just courtesy to follow up.  

If you have decided on another planner or stylist then tell us, we are not offended, usually it is one of our business buddies you have booked so we will know what you decided in anycase!

Images taken from Pinterest

Springtime Wedding in Seville City

I cannot quite believe we are now well and truly into October after what has been a fabulously busy and hot summer.  

I love this time of year, not only because it is my birthday month!, but now we can spend time looking back at our work, enjoying all the photos sent to us from the hugely talented photographers we work with and can share very special days and memories with you.

Heading back now to the gorgeous month of May, before our rather extreme heatwave took a grip on Spain this summer, we spent most of this month in the vibrant city of Seville.  In fact I was even beginning to search the real estate agents and thinking of buying a crash pad there!

Who cannot love this city, the capital of Andalucia, a hotbed of flamenco, passion and tapas bars, stunning architecture and one of the most beloved places here in Spain so where better to host a wedding!

K and K contacted us as they wished to host their intimate wedding in Seville with close family and friends.  With a Spanish family already here and the rest of their guests travelling with them from the States, Seville was the perfect location for everyone to make the journey to celebrate their marriage.

Casa Guardiola is a stunning palace house located just opposite the Alfonso XIII hotel and was the ideal location for K and K's wedding celebrations.

The afternoon started with a lovely ceremony in the garden room followed by a longer than usual cocktail in the Patio de Caballos where the guests were entertained with a jazz band, jamon cutter and a wonderful cheese table.

Dinner followed in the stunning Patio de Columnas with some lovely touches organised by the family as a surprise for the newly weds such as a wonderful video and some beautiful favours of chocolate and photo frames for each guest.

Whilst K and K wish to remain private we had to share such a stunning location with you and some of the details of their gorgeous day of which we have very fond memories.

Thank you to Joseba and Mar from Romance Weddings for, yet again, taking such lovely images of such a beautiful day and thank you to my team, especially Isabel, for working so hard to create yet another stunning wedding and dashing around the city to buy cake stands!

Wedding Celebrations at the Castillo de Santa Catalina, Malaga

Here we are at the beginning of 2015 and already busy planning our weddings for this coming year but are still receiving wonderful photos of our 2014 weddings to share with you.

Lea and Marouen's wedding at the end of September, is one of my favourites from 2014 and they were such a charming, sweet and delightful couple to work with. 

I remember meeting with Lea in Malaga at the beginning of last year and Jess driving Lea around Andalucia as they looked at venues, finally settling on the beautiful Castillo de Santa Catalina for their wedding and the Cortijo Sabila for the pre-wedding paella pool party and base for their wedding preparations.

As their wedding day approached though we were really excited but also frantically checking the weather on every possible available weather app known to mankind as a storm of gigantic proportions had been predicted hitting Malaga around 6pm just as their ceremony was about to start.  I think I was introduced to weather apps I did not know existed this day!

We, as wedding planners, and knowing the huge amount of rain that can literally pour from Spanish skies had sadly resorted to going with plan B to play safe but instead after much consulting, toing and froing and a rather large and elaborate floral arch being moved from inside the venue to outside via a lift and a flight of stairs, plus a little bit of stress, and last minute parasols being hired in, we decided to risk it and continue with plan A.

In the end not one drop of rain reached us as the storm raged out over the sea and a beautiful and fabulous wedding was underway.  We were so lucky but I have never seen so many eyes looking up to the skies and surveying the looming clouds!
  
The girls got ready at the Cortijo Sabila where they were well and truly looked after by the one of the greatest hosts I know, Yvonne.  Jess was totally in love with Lea's dress and having palpitations over her beautiful Jimmy Choo shoes!   Then the girls left and travelled down to Malaga to the stunning Castillo where Lea and Marouen's beautiful ceremony was conducted on the roof terrace of the Castillo de Santa Catalina by the lovely Natasha.   

We created a floral arch which we think looked lovely despite being moved and broken down to fit into the lift and quickly reassembled!   The aisle on the roof terrace was lined with blossom trees and blush petals and a welcome table was set up displaying the Order of Service booklets we designed, antique pink parasols, personalised fans and confetti.

The cocktail area set in the Castillo's ruins really did not need much decoration as it is so beautiful but we set up a fun area for bling rings and hats and created a lovely table seating plan with different frames set onto a wooden board.

As the evening progressed we have never seen so much dancing under the fairy lights, it was fabulous, the celebrations were well and truly underway.  There was a wonderful flamenco display followed by a delicious meal and a lot of dancing away into the early hours with Tristan the DJ.

The wedding theme was blush and golds, we decorated the venue with lots of lanterns and a large fairy light display hanging down the walls of the venue.  The tables were beautifully sparkly with our gold sequin table runners, blush, pink and peach floral arrangements set into vintage style gold pots surrounded with gold tealights, the whole effect was beautiful and stylish.

Lea and Marouen provided each guest with some very pretty favors of chocolates decorated with blush flowers and a little bag of sugar almonds which were set off perfectly on each place setting which we had styled with our gold charger plates and tied each napkin with a blush ribbon.

Jess and Rocio organised the whole day beautifully and the wedding cake was created by the venue and finished with some lovely gold glitter heart cake topper decorations ordered by Lea as she knew she could not have a wedding without my love of gold glitter!

We hope you enjoy these photos of such a beautiful wedding at the Castillo de Santa Catalina, we have lots of weddings there again this coming year so we are sure this will help many of our couples envisage their own weddings here.

Our thanks to Jess and Rocio for being such fabulous planners, the venue, Joseba Sandoval from Romance Weddings for such wonderful images, Yvonne at the Cortijo Sabila, Natasha the celebrant, Tristan the DJ and of course our congratulations to Lea and Marouen x